Having Fun All The Time

Before nodding off, I happened to check the New York Times site to find that the artist Ai Weiwei had been released by Chinese authorities early this morn or late last night.

Having not spoken to any Chinese about this news, I have nothing original to say except that it seems like very good news in terms of free speech on Earth, I think the best I’ve seen in months.

The AP photo showing AWW shortly after he was released. Notice the two foreigners in the background. This could be one instance where foreign news coverage actually did some good in China.

My original inclination was to say that this seems like the best news related to China that I’ve seen in a long time, but that seems a little too broad. I think of the fact that last summer China surpassed Japan to become the second largest economy in the world; or that Chinese officials appear to be acknowledging that there are some problems with the Three Gorges Dam project; or that the Chinese government was meeting with Libya’s opposition leader in Beijing.

So those are all debatably better pieces of news for China, depending on your perspective. I.e., if you are an investor or a Chinese businessperson, you are probably happy that China’s economy is doing fairly well. If you are an environmentalist or live in southern China, you might be happy that the Chinese government is beginning to see the light about their ill-conceived and megalomaniacal Three Gorges Dam (i.e. if you live in southern China, you might be happy to see that the government has the capacity to show a glimmer of insight about environmental hazards associated with overly ambitions attempts to control nature). If you happen to believe that there is some legitimacy to England, France and America’s attempt to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power, and do not believe the conflict is simply a conspiracy among Western powers to sequester oil (as most Chinese seem to think it is), perhaps you will be pleased, if also perplexed, to know that the Chinese were meeting with the rebel leader.

But Ai Weiwei is a different matter. Ai was detained about three months ago, and has hardly been heard from since. I will leave it to you to check out the news about this artist-”dissident”, who has been an (perhaps the most) “outspoken critic” of the Chinese government for a long time. The only thing I can say about the release of Ai Weiwei is that, from everything I have seen and read of how dissidents are treated in this country, the Chinese government would not have released him unless they felt a great deal of pressure to do so, and that pressure, I believe, would have had to come from within Chinese borders.

I wrote a little bit (it’s embarrassing how little I write here about real-consequential political matters, but so it is) about Ai Weiwei’s protest of the demolition of his Shanghai studio on this blog. A friend of mine invited me to go to Shanghai last summer to attend the “protest”, which was really more like a big party in which thousands of Ai Weiwei fans were signing up to go eat river crab in Shanghai. At the time, I was busy and couldn’t go, but it was for the best because Ai Weiwei was put under house arrest and couldn’t attend, and I’m not even sure if the party really happened.

My friend gave me one of the seeds from Ai’s exhibit (or a replica thereof) at the Tate Modern Gallery in London, a souvenir he received for being a follower of Ai. That was as close as either of us got to whatever the protest would have been, had it been allowed to occur.

Now Ai has been released, and the New York Times story suggests that he may have been released under some agreement with the government that would limit his actions. But he has been released, in one piece, and he is talking to the foreign press, and he is still there.

That seems worth celebrating in itself. Chinageeks.org posted a startling list a few months back of the China dissidents who had either been detained or were missing in March. The list is long, and I’m unclear on how comprehensive it is / was, but anyway, just looking at the post gives you a sense of the lack of restraint the Chinese government has when it comes to silencing disagreeable parties.

So it’s cause for celebration that Ai Weiwei had been released. I believe that when you consider peoples’ basic motivations — i.e., the desire of individuals to build and maintain power — politics can become very simple. At its most basic, the decision to release Ai Weiwei might be seen as a concession to the belief of a public, one that remains inscrutable to most of us foreigners, that he should be free. Or at least I hope that’s the case, as the alternative would be that his arrest was meant as a threat to him and others like him that he should keep quiet.

But Ai Weiwei, at this point, seems a bit beyond the fold in my eyes. He had certainly been warned before, and had become too great a target to be used to set an example. It seems to me, and maybe this is more of a hope than a realistic interpretation of events, that perhaps after they caught him they realized they had nabbed too big a fish, and had to let him go. Anyway, he has been let go. Here’s hoping he’s still got gills.

It’s no secret that foreigners get stared at in China. Especially if you have very white or black skin, are especially tall or have non-black hair. You will get stared at a lot. You will have to become comfortable with your appearance, and if you’re not, you’ll have to change it. I’ve done a bit of both in the past two years — changing and getting comfortable with being looked at, and while there are times when it gets overwhelming and I just want to not be noticed by anyone for one minute, just to see what it would be like again, for the most part, I’m OK with it.

There’s another interesting aspect to it, though, aside from my own comfort level with being stared at. That is that other people in my company sometimes get weirded out by the sudden attention they’re getting from all directions.

For example, two weekends ago I was having lunch with a couple of my students. I teach a handful of high school students on Sundays, and usually we have lunch together after class in the food court in the mall downtown. Last weekend we happened to sit next to a whole family, like three generations sitting together, who had come to the clean and modern food court to have their lunch. Naturally, the two old ladies in the family, upon finding themselves seated next to me, could not stop talking about me, my skin, the way I ate, the way I spoke Chinese, the way other foreigners they had seen on the street or on television looked and spoke and ate and etc.

Note that they weren’t talking to me but about me, while sitting to my immediate right. It should have been clear to them that I understood everything they were saying, because I was talking with my students in Chinese. But this fact, that I probably understood, had no affect on them.

It drove my students nuts, however. They couldn’t focus on the conversation at all, and repeatedly went blank-faced when I asked them questions. I didn’t realize that it was because of the conversation going on to my right until the family got up and left and all the students gave sighs of relief, and one of them said, in English, “Finally they go!”

This is not new, however. Early on I learned that my Chinese friend Mike hated walking down the street with me, because all the staring eyes freaked him out. He would often walk behind me until I told him that if he didn’t stop pretended not to know me I was going to ditch him. The people it doesn’t seem to freak out is very pretty women. I was once walking with a very attractive female friend and asked her if all the people staring at us bothered her. “People stare at me all the time,” she said.

I did notice one other thing recently: When I’m walking down a crowded street, the people in front of me (i.e. the ones I’m walking behind) will often turn around to see what is behind them because so many people are staring at the space behind them that they know something is there, they just don’t know what. This is often creepy for me to witness, because it’s like they have eyes in the back of their heads and just intuitively know that a laowai is there. It took me awhile to notice that phenomenon, and now that I have I kind of get a kick out of it.

Which brings me to my last, and funniest thing about being such a spectacle for being white: I learned last year that if I go to McDonald’s and sit on the bench and put my arm around the statue of Ronald McDonald and sit perfectly still, people have no idea if I’m real or not and so slow way down and stare at me until I crack up. Which takes about .005 seconds. I guess it’s immature but it’s probably also the most fun thing I have ever done.

Last year at about this time, I was moving into a friend’s apartment to stay for the month of June while he went back to his home country (Camaroon) to see his family. My friend was another foreign teacher at the college, and he had long paid for his own apartment in the city center, even though the college also provided housing on campus for us foreign teachers.

The place was pretty spartan. He had two bedrooms, a kitchen, a small bathroom with no hot water and a dining room slash living room. He had furnished the apartment with a folding aluminum table in the kitchen, about five blue plastic stools, a more than 10-year-old bed in the bedroom, a typewriter stand with a computer on it next to the bed, a TV on a TV stand in the corner of the bedroom, and a bamboo mat on the floor of the second bedroom. There was a poster of a young Chinese pop-star-looking model half torn off the wall of the second bedroom (left by the previous resident) and a laminated picture of a Chinese woman that a student of his had cut from red paper. Aside from a refrigerator that stood in the kitchen with a bowl sitting on top of it, and built-in closets full of clothes, that was all that he had in the apartment. He had lived there for more than a year.

Despite the black hole of charm that this apartment represented, however, it was an improvement from my previous living situation. The apartment I had on the college campus was old and unclean, and located too far from the city. So I was glad to move into my friend’s apartment in the city.

His apartment quickly proved to be not to my liking, though, mostly due to a serious roach problem. I remember one night in particular that I was spending with my girlfriend at the time, after we entered the apartment I turned on the light, and then quickly turned it off again. “Are you afraid of cockroaches?” I asked her in Chinese.

“Yes,” she said.

“Wait outside for a minute,” I said. She stepped outside, I went back in, turned on the light, killed as many Cheeto-sized roaches as I could before they all scattered out of sight (about three or four), and then poked my head out the door. “OK, you can come in now,” I said.

After that, I simply decided to move into the newest building I could find in the city. This is an urge I have never had before in any place. I’ve always gravitated towards old places, places that I thought had more of an austere look and seemed a bit weathered. But that changed after I dealt for a while with dirt, roaches, rats and bats. I became a lover of new things, and in this way came to understand, to some degree, not to romanticize poverty or to intuitively reject development as an idea.

This is all a rambling way to introduce the place where I now live, which is called “Sunny City”. Before I moved in here the place looked ridiculous to me: about 20 brand-new apartment buildings in a huge cluster, built on top of an underground shopping mall. The buildings are all around 20-stories, which by my reckoning means there are around 2,000 or more apartment units, which is pretty vast. The grounds are all nicely landscaped and well tended. There is at-your-door garbage pickup. There are security cameras. Like most Chinese construction, the buildings are already showing signs of wear and deficient building — there’s a crack in the wall of my bedroom, and for some reason for months all the kitchen fans on this side of the building seemed to blow backwards directly into my apartment through my kitchen fan. So that was awesome. But other than that, it’s mostly OK. I haven’t killed any roaches or wild animals in my home for a year, which has been very nice.

But there is one thing that is maddening about the place — one thing that I realized recently would never be accepted in the U.S.: the noise.

The thing about Sunny City is that the buildings were considered complete before any of the apartments’ interiors had been designed or built. Half of the apartments in the park haven’t been sold or lived in yet. That means that even though there are already a ton of people living here, every time an apartment is sold it must be built on the inside. They are selling these fuckers a la carte. And building an apartment’s interior is, it turns out, very loud.

Last weekend they were resurfacing a wall in a unit just below mine, which mean that there was a guy with a hammer and chisel taking the tiles and the concrete binding agent off the wall, and it took him four days. He started at 7:45 every morning. I know this because the noise sounded like it was right next to my head, and it was impossible to sit in my apartment without feeling like I was going nuts when the chiseling was going on. It lasted about six hours each day. No writing happened on those days. At one point I resorted to picking up a corner of my very heavy bed and slamming it on the floor, in the hope that it might make him stop (yes, clearly illogical).

At one point, I remembered with nostalgia the nice notes the landlady used to put up in the elevator in my apartment in Portland, Ore. when the water was going to be off for 45 minutes on a Tuesday morning at 10:30, when no one was going to be home anyway. Even then the notes seemed absurd. Just turn off the water, lady — do you really think we’re gonna complain? I used to think. Now the elevator note seems like an exotic and incredible fairy tale. Nobody else in this building seemed particularly disturbed by the hammering last week. It just happened, and people accepted it. And this happens all the time. People are much more willing to accept rude and abrupt intrusions into their personal space and nice quiet bubble, to an extent that Americans’ finickiness and insistence that others’ respect their personal space and right to peace and quiet and safety seems completely absurd.

The best example I can think of is that the last time I went home, I was shocked to learn that you’re not allowed to use cell phone on long-range buses in the U.S. I had forgotten this in my time in China. The idea that someone was telling me not to make phone calls to respect others’ who might want to rest seemed laughable when I heard it, but it was great when I wanted to take a nap. You never find that here. It seems a long range bus ride is a license for the loudest imaginable person to start shouting into his cell phone here.

This idea extends to so many things in life, including accepting the decisions of authority. I have been astonished to see the gentle, almost blithe acceptance by people here of decisions from above — decisions that make me bridle as though someone had taken away one of my basic rights, or denied me food, or something. In my first couple of months of teaching there was a sports meet at the university for which all classes would be canceled for a couple days, and I didn’t find out about it two days before. How could they not tell me? I said to myself. Don’t they know that if they had told me a head of time I could have planned some travel, or something? Now I’m just going to sit at home with nothing to do. I was sincerely, unashamedly pissed off. Then the next day, when, because of rain, the sports meet was canceled and class was back on the following day, I was even more pissed. What if I had made plans to travel somewhere?! I chafed.

But people around me just accepted it, as I’ve seen them do time after time here over the past two years. An order comes down from above, and everybody follows it. There is no use complaining. Complaining only makes people upset and angry. You’re better off just going along with it.

The cultural difference was hammered home last week when I was describing to my Chinese teacher an ordeal involving an alum from my college in the U.S., who I had helped the university invite to China to teach. They had strung him along for a month, saying that the position, and then at the last minute, in a mysterious, completely unexplained twist of events, they had changed their minds and said they had enough foreign teachers. He had put off job searching for a month and several people had spent a lot of time communicating to prepare for his trip out, not to mention the Chinese books he bought to get ready, and the kind of mental preparations you have to make for a trip like that. But the word came down from above, and the people who informed him and me of the change passed on the information nonchalantly, as if they couldn’t imagine a world in which another option aside from indifferent acceptance was possible.

When I told my teacher about this, I used the word “disappointment”, cuozhe, and her reaction was confusion.

“No, I think that word is too strong,” she said. “You should use a lighter word.” Her eyes looked straight ahead as she searched for a word, as if the story didn’t even warrant a negative label — really, as if this was actually how things should have gone. Then she came up with a word. “This is just a small trouble,” she said, using xiao (meaning small) and mafan, which is the kind of word you use when you don’t want to put ketchup on your fries because opening the little foil ketchup packet is too mafan. “You can just call it a small trouble.”

By now I could almost expect this reaction, and I felt a weird mix of guilt but also frustration. Guilt because I knew for a fact that she, my teacher, had experienced much worse in her life than I could ever imagine, and therefore really did see the problem as just a small trouble; and frustration, of course, because I am an American, and some part of me — I would even say some slightly spoiled, self-righteous part (characteristics that aren’t necessarily always bad) — wanted to insist. No, this is not just a small trouble, he wanted to say. This is a tragedy!

I suppose everybody, even people in the U.S., know that the Internet in China is censored. Here in the mainland, foreigners tend to refer to the block that is imposed on their Internet use as the “Great F!rew@ll of China” (you can take out the exclamation point and at sign yourself), also known by its abbreviation, the G – F  _ W, or sometimes called the “Net N@nny” (again remove at sign).

If you think I’m going overboard with my use of euphemistic @s and !s, then you haven’t been trying to use the Internet in China the last couple of weeks.

Gmail: I can't live if living is without you.

Starting about two weeks ago, the V.P.N. (virtual private network) that I previously used to access blocked sites in China went dead. There was no warning, no explanation — just a dot that had been green on my MacBook’s menu bar went to orange, and I couldn’t open Facebook anymore.

For those not in the know, a V P N is a service that allows you to connect to an offshore ISP, which encodes the transfer of information between you and the I.S.P. and allows you to circumvent any blockage that might be going on in the place you’re in. V.P.N.s are also used by businesses to encode Internet use within the company, so that information can’t be stolen by “hackers” (the Chinese word for hacker, interestingly, is hei1ke4, 黑客, or “black guest”).

The service I use costs about $60 U.S. per year, not a huge dent in the fender, and allowed me to continue to communicate with friends and family back home via Facebook, also to post pictures of my life here and generally remain connected. (Facebook seems to have taken the place of email over the past few years. For some reason it just now seems more comfortable, and more personal, to send messages by Facebook rather than by email.)

The service also allowed me to keep posted about the real goings on within China. One of the most noticeable victims of the Net N@nny has been China bloggers, who sometimes find cause to write blog posts that are either critical of big papi here or that simply say things big papi would not rather have out there. I follow about 20 blogs that cover China, most of which are blocked here. The news is interesting and, more than informing me about political events, also give me a lot of non-sensitive news about what’s happening here that I can’t find in Western news sources.

The New York Times isn’t blocked. (Maybe big papi isn’t so worried about a big, unwieldy English news source?) Most university sites aren’t blocked. General harmless information that has nothing to do with China isn’t blocked, naturally. And Wikipedia generally isn’t blocked, but if you try to look up anything controversial you’re going to come up with a big “This webpage is not available” error message.

But Facebook, Youtube, blogger.com sites, many Wikipedia pages, countless non-blogger.com blogs, all sites that reveal more skin than a woman or man in a bathing suit, and countless other news and information sources are blocked by the Great F!rew@ll of China. The only reason that this blog is not blocked in China is because I have never written the names of certain places, and I have never written anything remotely critical of big papi, or if I have I have done so carefully (as evidence see this post).

This was all fine and acceptable to me, as long as I could use my trusty V.P.N. And I think most laowai (“old outside”, i.e. foreigner in Chinese) felt the same way. We went about our business, keeping ourselves informed and connected and I think, for the most part, keeping our traps shut about controversial issues when talking with Chinese people on a daily basis.

But soon after my V.P.N. went haywire, I started to experience an even worse problem: Gmail was suddenly acting very strange, sometimes not loading at all, loading very slowly, taking forever to load emails or perform searches, moving like a snail when I wanted to send a message and sometimes never getting there at all.

I think I read somewhere, back in my high school Psychology class, that if you feed a rat every five minutes, it gets used to the predictability of its food and slowly saunters over when snacks arrive. If you feed the rat every ten hours, you get about the same reaction. But if you mess with the rat’s head — if you give it food now, then five minutes later, then an hour later, then twenty seconds later, then a day later, the rat goes completely nuts every time the food arrives. It thinks the food will never come again after this one time. To anthropomorphize, the rat is driven completely insane with the unpredictability of things.

This is, it turns out, what China is trying to do to its Gmail users. The country’s censors decided not to completely block Gmail, but instead to mess with Gmail, so that its users never know when it’s going to work or not work, so that we’re constantly on edge, so that every time we try to check our email we sweat a little.

I wish I were making this shit up. But I’m not. A few days after Gmail started acting really weird, first bloggers started to complain (see John Pasden’s helpful post and his links for more), then headlines started popping up about Gmail not working for other users, and then finally, just two days ago, Google officially accused China of interfering with Gmail’s services.

“There is no technical issue on our side — we have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,” Google said in a statement.

Google finally threw down the gauntlet and accused big papi of what those of us on this side of the wall knew all along. Somehow papi had found a way to seriously screw with Gmail services in the country without totally blocking them. There’s a lot of mumbo jumbo on the net about how technically difficult this is to do, but what it came down to was that Gmail was just barely usable.

There were other people saying that Google docs and other services had become unusable as well, and that, again, papi had found a way to make it look like everything was fine on this end, but that something was screwy with Google.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It was just big papi interfering with our internal affairs. And for this laowai, this issue suddenly became very personal. I use Google Video to chat with my family. Of course I use it to email everyone I know. I use it for document backup for my writing. I use it for chat. I check it ten times a day. More than six years of conversations, long-winded emails, and contact information of people I barely hear from anymore, are stored there. It’s very much in my blood, a part of my life.

Perhaps its sad, but this development was the first that really made me question whether I want to be here in China, or at least, it made me question my being here more than any other thing I’ve encountered in my 15-ish months here has. I started trying to think of using a Chinese email client, switching my email and informing everyone I know, no longer being able to be informed about what is really going on in the place where I live, and I thought, is it worth it?

I don’t know if it’s worth it. Certainly the lack of Gmail is not the greatest tragedy of the Great F!rew@ll. The fact that hundreds of millions of people can’t read about what’s happening in their country is clearly more relevant. Or the fact that including the English word “sex” in an email can make it impossible to send without use of a V.P.N. here. But that doesn’t affect me as much. For laowai, I suppose it’s more about what our situation is — if we can find a way to make life here worth it, especially those of us who are just here to live and learn, and have only personal reasons for wanting to get around the Wall.

The vinegar in the wound is that Baidu, the Chinese response to Google.com, is such a shameless ripoff it’s not funny. Google.com, for instance, recently added a feature that allows search results to roll down as you scroll down the page, so that you don’t have to thumb-forward to see the next page of search results. As far as I could tell, within two weeks of Google.com adding the feature, Baidu had added it as well (hm, that feature seems to have disappeared now…maybe my observation was wrong). Renrenwang, likewise, is the China mainland response to Facebook. It, too, is a shameless ripoff of Facebook, featuring the same designs, same features, same theme color.

The same sites that are blocked in mainland China are copied by mainland companies, down to the most basic design elements. Of course, this is the smart move for China. It shelters domestic companies and protects papi from the dissemination of potentially dangerous information. But it’s nearly the definition of frustration for laowai. It is not infuriating. There are much more infuriating things that happen here every day. It is merely frustrating.

To cap off the post, I’ll say that as of today, about a day after the Google announcement that China was interfering with Gmail (accusations that big papi denied), all of the issues with Gmail seem to have mysteriously disappeared. This is the “feint” that, I hope, has concluded papi’s interference in our Gmail usage. The poor drunk went too far, and hopefully all the people who use Gmail all over the country helped to put him in line. But who knows, really. He could turn it all off, the whole Internet, for all I know, tomorrow, and it’s impossible to say what the people here would do.

Maybe they would just shrug their shoulders, and say oh well, and turn back to whatever it was they were doing. Except for one little problem that (I guess) might come up: That thing they were doing? It was probably using the Internet!

I was in my apartment studying Chinese last Friday when the earthquake struck and the tsunami hit Japan. One of my high school students sent me a text message that said simply:

“News Alert: Tsunami Hits Japan After 8.8 Magnitude Earthquake Off Coast”

After learning that the tsunami wouldn’t at all affect the province I’m in, my first thought was about my friend Mami, a Japanese teacher who lives on the coastal capital city of this province. I see her every week or so. I met her last summer while I was traveling in Fujian. I was worried that the tsunami might have been near her home, because she’s from a beach town. But Mami is from Okinawa, the far South of Japan, and after a quick scan of the news it was obvious that Okinawa hadn’t been damaged by the tsunami. I called her an hour or so later (I figured her students would be jamming her phone with messages, so I didn’t call right away) and she said everybody in her family was fine, but she wasn’t sure about some friends who were living in northern Japan.

A photo of a whirlpool off the coast of Japan from the Sendai quake - pulled from ChinaSmack.com

Actually, the first day the news didn’t sound so bad. The New York Times reported that only a hundred or more people had died. This sounds strange now, since the headlines are saying that more than 10,000 have died, but the first day it didn’t seem so bad.

The thing I dreaded the most that first day was hearing what Chinese people were going to say about it. I assumed, since Chinese are  generally very open and unabashed about their negative feelings toward Japanese (and vice versa, from what I’ve heard, although I’ve never been to Japan so I don’t know), that people would gloat and be happy about the horrible disaster. I braced myself for what I assumed would be a few days of jarring, insensitive comments.

It turned out that I underestimated people, at least the people I know. I first asked my close Chinese friend Mike what he thought about the disaster, since that evening I was in his family’s house and the news was on the TV.

“It’s a terrible tragedy,” he said in English. “Of course there is some negative history between the two countries, but this kind of natural disaster is no one’s fault.”

Since I know that Mike is generally more open-minded than the average Chinese, I asked him if he thought other people would be happy about the disaster.

“Zhege wo bu dong,” he said. I don’t know about that.

So I decided, in my Sunday speech classes with the high school students, to use the Japan earthquake as a discussion prompt. All of my students were interested in talking about the event, but their faces all grew a little austere when I asked them if people would be happy about it. One student of mine, Anthony, whose English is pretty good, saw it coming and addressed it before I even asked her.

“Of course, there is some bad history between the two countries. But if anyone thinks that the earthquake is a good thing, that is wrong. This has happened to innocent people,” she said (after asking me in Chinese how to say “innocent”).

One of my students, Rachel, said that she had already donated money to a rescue organization in Japan. She added, looking a bit shy, that she had donated much more money when an earthquake struck Sichuan Province in western China in 2008, killing more than 68,000 people. “Because I should give more to my country,” she said.

Among all the people I’ve talked to, everyone has seemed gravely sympathetic to the Japanese over the disaster, perhaps because the memory of the Sichuan earthquake is not too distant. And it has been pleasantly surprising to me to see people be sympathetic, especially since in recent months the Chinese have been pretty vocal about their disregard for the Japanese. Last fall there were protests all over China, even in this small city, after the Japanese Coast Guard detained a Chinese fishing vessel captain after his boat crashed into a Japanese vessel in contested waters.

Another photo from the earthquake - pulled from ChinaSmack

Last semester I even got into an argument with a student from the English department when he told me, with no prompting from myself, that Chinese hate Japanese. I confronted him on the opinion and tried to make it clear that it was offensive to me, which ultimately seemed to offend him. Eventually, the student actually got up from the lunch table and walked away from me, a sign of disrespect no one had ever shown me here. I tried to resolve it by getting up, stopping him, and explaining that as a foreigner I didn’t understand some things about Chinese culture, and that my intent was not to disagree but to learn. That seemed to calm him down, but it was still an awkward encounter, and after that I decided not to talk to Chinese about Japanese if I could avoid it.

But a levy seems to have broken: I sense little animus from Chinese towards Japanese now. The Chinese government sent a team of rescuers to try to help out in the country, and even on ChinaSmack (where the Internet hate-speak that all Internet users spew out is translated from Chinese into English) comments were supportive of Japan, and in the cases where people decided to say something offensive (“Because it’s Japan, I’m so happy”) there were other commenters who kept them in check (“The entire world will look at the reaction of Chinese people, can you please not make us lose face? Don’t forget that only yesterday Yunnan had an earthquake, do you want to completely lose face for Chinese people?”).

Of course, all this is in the face of a complete nightmare going on in the country next door. I just read in the Times that 400,000 people are homeless, well over 10,000 dead, and a nuclear power plant is fomenting the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Mami, my friend in Fuzhou, has gotten in touch with her friends in northern Japan and said that they’re all OK, but none of them can get back to their homes. They don’t even know if they still have homes. And my other Japanese friend, who is still in New York, may have friends or family in the same situation or worse.

It’s reason to be grateful to know that I, and the people I’m closest to, are all in safe places. And I guess comforting that even though the country next door has been crippled by a very sad natural disaster, at least people on this side of the map care enough to put the past aside.

Well, I’m back at my desk in China, studying Chinese, reading books, and scrambling, somewhat, to prepare for classes that I completely neglected to prepare for while I was home. Which was just as well, because it gave me time to hang out with people, get caught up as much as possible on what had been happening in my friends’ and families’ lives for the past year or so and just enjoy being there.

It was definitely a huge recharger, seeing friends especially and being around people who I relate to instinctively; at first it was unfamiliar and a little scary, I think because I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to relate or connect anymore for whatever reason. But when we did it felt good, as you’d expect, and made me question all over again whether I really wanted to go back to China.

Of course, not having anything else lined up, I had to come back. And now have been back for about three days. But the hard things about coming back are not the ones I expected. I’ve found that it’s basically just a horrible bitch to get over the time difference and the germs that you’re exposed to during long-distance travel, that moving from China to America and America to China is basically the same in that your first couple of days in either place is challenging physically and mentally, just because you have to confront a life that you haven’t confronted in a while, and do it on a severely mangled sleep schedule. Apart from that, and from a nasty cold that set in after my first day here, it’s been smooth — I was surprised at how natural and normal it felt to walk into my apartment building and put down my bags in the apartment I hadn’t seen for 5 weeks. Similar to how it used to feel to arrive back in Oregon after having been on the East Coast for a week or so, except in this case I was a hell of a lot farther from home.

Even that seems pretty remarkable to me. On the way to the airport I asked my father how long he thought it would have taken to get to China 100 years ago, and although I don’t know I assume it would be at least weeks and probably months. Now you can do it in a day and a half and feel like you never left.

Some observations from being home:

American food consists mainly of cheese and fried beef. That’s OK, but it becomes a problem because I love those foods. Particularly cheese. The fact that cheese is hard to come by in small-town China is extremely good for my waistline.

After a year in China, it takes about three weeks not to be stunned every time you see a person of non-Asian ethnicity.

After a year in China, even if you hate everything about Fox News, it is for some reason just intrinsically interesting to watch on TV. I have no idea why about this one. I can’t even begin to explain it. Maybe it has to do with how Fox News presents a simplified, uglier version of Americanism that is pretty close to the Chinese idea of what Americans are. I don’t know. That’s just a theory and I don’t think it’s true. It’s just fascinating, is all. The English voices, the big loud Americans, the bright colors, the extravagance, the extreme theories and unadorned Americanism. It’s weird. I couldn’t get enough of it, like picking at an itchy scab, so satisfying. I’d never even watched Fox News before this trip back to the U.S., but every time I saw it this time I was transfixed.

China quickly becomes a weird almost inaccessible washed-out memory. After a week home I found it difficult to recall lots of things, but now that I’m back that doesn’t make any sense because I don’t seem to have forgotten any of the language.

People in the U.S. are interested in China. I ended up having a lot more conversations about China than I expected with people who seemed genuinely interested. I kind of expected people to be pretty indifferent, because it’s such a far-away, weird, obscurely unknown kind of place. But people were pretty interested across the board, not too judgy, just asked questions and listened, which was really cool.

Now that I’ve woken up after a 15-hour night’s sleep and am feeling much better than I did the last two days, I think I’m getting used to things again and not feeling completely destroyed by the time change, I’m getting a bit more glad to be back. Not completely there yet, but getting there.

In October 2009 I left the U.S. to fly to China, to some city that I probably couldn’t have pointed to on a map if you asked me. I left by car; actually my mom drove me from my parents’ house in New Hampshire the five hours down to JFK in the middle of the night; we arrived after midnight and waited outside a brightly lit airport restaurant for the check-in counter to open. After I checked in we moved to the second floor, because it seemed a little quieter, and sat by a big wall of windows –it was still night so the windows were black — and waited for the time when my plane would board.

When it came time to go board I didn’t feel like I was consciously walking and moving and talking anymore; I was swimming in a mixture of emotions, just fighting to keep moving. And then, of course, saying goodbye to my mom felt like saying goodbye to the last person I knew in the world; the idea that I was going someplace where no one knew me or was likely to know anything about people like me was not just in my brain but enveloping my whole brain with fog. I guess I’m a creature who generally shies away from change, even though I have managed to find it pretty consistently in life for the past ten years.

Hugging my mom and saying bye was the first time that I felt like maybe bagging the whole thing, the whole idea, and just saying nope, take me home: Not goin’. Can’t do it.

Of course I didn’t do that. I recently returned home for the first time after about 15 months in China teaching English and studying Chinese. At a certain point I decided to go, and, knowing that it would be a disaster to let fear or anxiety get in the way of that plan, and wanting very much to stay there and have an immersive experience, I stayed.

I think a lot of people would not have such a hard time leaving home to go live in another country like China for so long — some people are better at it than others. But that saying-goodbye moment was very difficult for me — maybe the toughest thing that I’ve done.

The good news was, as I discovered, that was also the hardest thing I would have to do. Before I left, a friend who knew somebody who had also taught in China recalled a quote about the initial going-away experience: “It’s like jumping off the end of a pier into dark water, and when you land realizing that the water is only a foot deep.” I wouldn’t say that arriving in China, adjusting to the culture, making friends and learning the language, was as easy as wading around in knee-deep water, but it was a lot easier than I imagined it to be when I was waiting in the U.S. to leave.

I spent 15 months there. I learned, more or less, how to be a decent ESL teacher (although I know I still have a lot to learn about being a teacher). I made Chinese friends who I’ll definitely remember forever and had experiences that have totally changed my worldview. I managed to become fairly conversant in Chinese, although I also have many more years’ work ahead of me on that front. But I made it through, and none of the bad stuff I imagined before I left happened, or if some of my fears turned out to be true (getting sick from the water or street food, for instance), they weren’t nearly as bad as I imagined they could be (getting sick from water or food was never a major inconvenience — it happens, but I certainly never had to go to the hospital for it, for example).

So in the end I would say that the maxim about going to China was half-true. Or maybe I would offer this modification: “It’s like jumping off the end of a pier into dark water and remembering, oh yeah, I can swim.” Life in China isn’t necessarily harder than life in the U.S. : it’s just different, in a thousand fascinating ways.

So I’m going back in a month to continue teaching, with the hopes of reaching a level with my Chinese so that I can be certified as proficient, which hopefully will help me go in new directions that I maybe haven’t even thought of yet. And I’m looking forward to going back. When I was in NYC last week and walked by a Chinese man playing an erhu and all the memories came flooding back to me, I knew I wanted to go back. So I’m gonna. Hopefully I can find some people who want to go to Sanming to teach, too, because that school needs good teachers.

I think I’m making progress on the front of being not so sensitive to questions and comments that make huge generalizations about Americans, foreigners, white people on a regular basis here, especially from people who don’t have any experience with foreigners.

But it can be a challenge. In a recent Chinesepod lesson, John Pasden, the foreigner host of the show (it’s a daily podcast for learning Chinese) mentioned that China is a post-industrial, pre-PC culture — meaning that, for example, in China it’s still OK to call someone fat if they’re fat, if they’re deaf-mute to call them dumb, or, to distinguish blind from seeing people by call seeing people “normal”.

This spills over into a million different things. I can’t profess to really get it. I think to some extent, to deal with non-PC-ness you just have to be a very easy-going person with an unshakable sense of humor. Which I have the capacity for, but sometimes am not really good at.

For example, yesterday, one of my Chinese teachers asked me if foreigners are all fat, if foreign women all look 60 when they’re 30; an acquaintance of mine recently used the derogatory word for black people at the dinner table (in Chinese and then, when I questioned him on it, in English); and pretty much every time I eat something that resembles junk food (which I do on occasion) some Chinese person in my vicinity turns to whomever is standing next to them and explains to them, in Chinese, that the only thing we foreigners eat is McDonald’s and KFC, so that’s why I’m eating that.

People also occasionally ask me why the United States is performing military drills in the Yellow Sea, up by Korea and Northern China, and then tell me, with barely masked emotion, that Chinese people are worried about it and think it is very dangerous. As if the white person before them can easily represent the views of basically the entire democratized world.

This stuff is stupid to get worked up over. Virtually all of these people have no contact with the outside world except through the government-run education system, the government-run media, and Hollywood movies.

(At the same time, however, they all learn English in school and learn about Western culture as part of their language study — which, I am coming to think, makes the majority of people rather confused about what exactly the outside world is, and makes it tougher for them to learn the language because half of learning a language is cultural.)

The result is a confusing mix of ideas that basically seem offensive to me whenever I run into them. But then I think about how foreigners and minorities deal with the myriad offensive conceptions that mainstream culture has of them in America (Indians, Chinese, Japanese, African Americans, Hispanics, hell, even people from Texas), and then I think about how different people from those groups deal with those misconceptions. Some of them choose to spend their lives being offended and pissed off, and some of them choose to find humor in how stupid it is. I’m trying to fall into the latter category in my life here.

And to be a little self-aware. After all, I’ve only met one or two people from Texas in my life, but I know that I have, on many occasions, uttered the words “I never met a Texan I liked.” (That was pre-Jamie’s girlfriend, if you read this, Jamie.)

Most of that is George Bush’s fault, and stereotypes, and of course I have long since let go of that idea (which I sort of just thought was funny). But I know that I had it at the time because it seemed entertaining, and I naively thought that as long as I never met any Texans, there was no way that my little bias against Texans could affect them.

Turns out I was probably wrong.

There are certain things that, as an American, you take for granted. And I have been realizing lately that when I was still in America there were some things I had never really thought about before — things that I have now, after living in China for 14 months, had more reason to consider.

The first one and one of the most important is that there are things we get as Americans that a lot of other people don’t get automatically; it just comes with the territory of living in an “undeveloped” country.

Like what? What could be so great about life in America that you can’t get someplace else?

Well, at first, nothing. You don’t really notice the stuff until you’ve been outside for a while. Then it all starts to stick out at you.

Take traffic, for example. At first, I just found the traffic here insane and thought no more of it. But now I think a little further, and think that the people here have no other choice. It’s their reality to almost get killed every other day crossing the street.

OK, that one’s easy. How about building codes. Does anybody inspect the buildings here to make sure they’re safe and nothing is going to fall on you and kill you? Apparently not. Exhibit A is the building that fell down in Shanghai last year complete, just fell over in one big piece. Fire escapes are rare and precarious-looking structures are ubiquitous.

This building fell over in one big piece in Shanghai last year

Moving on. The next one is hospitals. One of the few foreigners I know in this town had to get his appendix removed in the local hospital, and somehow during the surgery they didn’t quite put everything back in the right place when they sewed him up. So some of his stomach muscles don’t work anymore.

Peter Hessler, in his book “River Town”, also points out that a few of his acquaintances died in his two years in a Sichuan river city, due mostly to a less safe healthcare system.

The next one is mental health. I was explaining to my Chinese teacher (who is a psychology professor) recently some of the services my sister receives as a disabled person. One of the things I mentioned was that there are social workers who come to hang out with her and take her shopping and stuff like that.

Her response was: We don’t have those kind of people in China.

I also have some personal experience with a kid with a disability who’s family is afraid of telling the public school system about the kid’s disability for fear that teachers will ignore the kid and people will ridicule him, because disabled people have no real enforceable legal rights in the education system here.

Compare that to the system in America where kids may be teased for having disabilities, but where they are also entitled to a whole host of rights and resources and modified forms of education (at least a great deal of the time), which entitlements are enforceable by suing the state.

Then, of course, there’s health care for the old, which I don’t know much about here but seems to be more or less nonexistent. I have had a couple of students whose elders have been dying or have passed away due to cancer of various varieties; the families didn’t have the money to pay for surgery so the old people just died, and this has happened occasionally with young people, too.

It’s hard to explain better than that, and probably none of this sounds particularly new or interesting. But it changes things to live here and know that if I were these people this would be my only reality — the world in which I would have to live and survive forever — and I think if that were the case for me my life would be a whole lot more oriented towards making money and finding security than it is now. Because the people here who manage to become wealthy-ish are able to have many of the securities and comforts that we’re afforded in wealthier western countries.

Many, but of course, not all.

Even more cause for a belated moment of gratitude.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and activist who is famous for lots of reasons, one of which his work “Sunflower Seeds” which is now at the Tate Modern gallery in London.

AiWW's work "Sunflower Seeds" consists of 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds on the floor of the gallery, which visitors could walk on and pick up and play with (until last month when they closed the exhibit to visitors because they were worried about dust from the seeds)

At the moment it seems he is famous for a party that he is holding at his studio in Shanghai this Sunday. He’s inviting (from what I hear) anybody who wants to come to his studio to feast on river crab (10,000 of them).

The Chinese word for river crab (he2xie4) sounds similar to the word “harmonize” or “harmonious” (he2xie2), which is the govt slang term for what happens to things on the Internet here that daddy don’t likey.

Another work of Ai Weiwei's from a series called "finger". He was also profiled in the New Yorker earlier this year

Which is, in turn, what is happening to AiWW’s art studio in Shanghai, which apparently he spent about 7 million yuan on (or $1 m ). The government has ordered that the studio be destroyed for reasons that to my layman’s eye appear to be the bureaucratic disguise of a politically motivated act (but you can read the actual story here or here).

The reason I know about this is only because a friend of mine asked if I’d be interested in going to the party in Shanghai, which is being held this weekend, but I declined because I’m just too busy for the next two weeks to do anything but work.

But it sounds interesting. I can’t really tell how many people are planning to go but it seems like a pretty cool, quiet kind of implicit but acquiescent disagreement. The plan, from what I’ve heard/read, is just to eat crab and commemorate the destruction of the place.

My friend also mentioned that the organizers are offering to reimburse a share of some peoples’ travel expenses, but I don’t see that in any of the news stories about the party. And he said that they’re giving everybody two ceramic sunflower seeds.

There’s also a great movie about the making of the 100 million sunflower seeds that I really like because it goes to the little Chinese town where they manufactured them and there are little clips of Chinese women working that are so perfectly real. Like pretty Chinese girls in high heels sitting in an old shabby run-of-the-mill building and painting probably thousands of those seeds a day. At one point AiWW asks a woman how much money she’s made and she says about 2 or 3 thousand yuan (if my Chinese serves).

The video’s here: YouTube

Or here: Youku

AiWW also helped design the famous Bird’s Nest, aka the Beijing National Stadium, which was the architectural centerpiece of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and which is really important to a lot of people here. Especially last year people often mentioned the bird’s nest to me with a little glow of pride, and when I was in Beijing with my family this summer several people suggested that we check it out. It is pretty impressive. (Although AiWW later denounced it, classic rockstar move almost bordering on cliche but whatever.)

The Bird's Nest in Beijing, the architectural centerpiece for the Olympics in 2008

Oh yeah, I guess he also got a bit of a doffing by the police as a result of an art project of his in 2008…which ultimately resulted in him having to get brain surgery. I don’t want to find my site harmonized as well (I don’t have a fancy VPN anymore) so I guess I’ll just leave it at that, since I don’t have anything original to say on the subject anyway.

Except that there will be no exciting trip to Shanghai for me…too much stuff to do, I’m afraid.